Prelude: I’ve left academic research 3 years ago – and went from modelling gene networks to working in an internet agency. These years often felt like “That’s not what I signed up for!!!”, and I needed about half a year to find out what the hell I was even supposed to do there – and now I love it.
Recently, the subject of leaving academia keeps coming up in my conversations with random science people. Here’s a very abridged version of my view.

1. Universities produce too many life science PhDs.

2. Universities employ very few professors and permanent research staff.

3. The market is flooded with PhDs looking for permanent academic positions. The pay is low, and the contracts are short, and at the age of 40, your chances of being jobless or unhappy in a research tech job are quite high.

4. Getting out of academia if you’re older than 35 is not easy.
You will have a lot of experience, but that’s probably a lot of the wrong experience. I have been 28, when I quit my postdoc. At this point, I had spent 10 years in science (I started working in labs when I started uni) – and had some “minor” (irony alert!) issues with the transition.. Which brings us to:

5. Academia is very different from industry.
There are processes, meetings and deadlines every day. It’s productive. Also you don’t just think about a problem really long and hard. You talk about it in a series of scheduled workshops and then find a good solution for everybody. It feels slow, but in the end it’s faster than the academic option of just doing what you think is best.

6. Industry is (in my experience) MORE free than academia (while not being a professor).
In industry, you take the job if you like it. If you get bored, or don’t like it anymore, you just find a new one. Good luck trying that in academia.

7. The pay is a whole lot better (if you have the right skills).
Obviously you need to make sure you acquire the right skills. If you really feel like saving the world, how about saving the world with the money you make and the influence and knowledge you have because you worked your way up?

8. PhDs degrees are very useful. If you are in an environment where few people have them.
Somehow people actually think we are smart.

9. You really love research? Which part of research exactly?
What’s the part that is most fun? Solving problems? Uncovering knowledge? Doing things that nobody else is able to do? For me it was the latter…and now I’m doing more of this than ever in my lab years.

10. I hate these “10 reasons to …” posts.
(I always hated them. Leaving academia doesn’t change your personality that much.)